DefinitelyNotARobot

Can we evolve too quickly?

22 posts in this topic

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With great power comes great responsibility. - Uncle Ben

Imagine if you gave the button to all nuclear devices to a toddler. Do you think the toddler would be responsible enough to handle that device carefully, or do you think that they might not be able to comprehend that pressing the button would be a bad idea? My point is that you'd need a certain level of understanding and wisdom to a handle powers such as this.

Everything is evolving faster than ever right now. Technology is developing at an exponential rate and it's difficult to imagine where we'd be in another 500 years. Humanity must be able to keep up with this pace and we must evolve culturally too if we want to handle all of this technology responsibly. Just look at artificial intelligence. There are a lot of ethical discussion within AI development. I think that's a good start because we need to be mindful of the potential that this technology holds. It could be used in warfare, cyber terrorism, mass surveillance and all sorts of criminal activity. Having discussion about these ethical concerns is really important imo.

Here is a document talking about different risks of the image-generation software DALL-E 2 for example.

I wonder if humanity will keep up with all of this change. Our technology might implode on use one day if we're acting all recklessly. I'm not sure whether humanity is evolved enough to handle all of this. One problem is that different parts of the world are at different levels of development. So you can have a stage red dictatorship end up with some dangerous future technology. We don't want to go full unga bunga caveman mode and create something that will destroy us.

Another option would be that this advance of technology might actually cause a boost in our collective development. That would be sort of the good ending. But we can only speculate for now.

What do y'all think about the risk of our technology outpacing our collective wisdom? Are there any safety mechanisms within the collective psyche to avoid these issues? I'm thinking about some kind of collective ego backlash in case we're moving too fast. And how can we best prepare ourselves and the people around us (especially our elders and children) to face the landscape of the future?

Let's have a conversation about the cultural ramifications of our technological evolution.

Edited by DefinitelyNotARobot

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How do I know you aren't a robot?

I know what you are up to!!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X83CErgn0zc

Edited by Razard86

The same strength, the same level of desire it takes to change your life, is the same strength, the same level of desire it takes to end your life. Notice you are headed towards one or the other. - Razard86

Your ACTIONS REVEAL how you REALLY FEEL. Want TRUTH? Observe and ADMIT, do the OPPOSITE of what you usually do which is observe and DENY. - Razard86

Think about it.....Leo gave the best definition of the truth I ever heard...."The truth is what is..." so if that is the truth.... YOUR ACTIONS IN THE PRESENT ARE THE TRUTH!! It's what's happening....do you like what you see? Can you accept it? You are just a SENTIENT MIRROR, OBSERVING ITS REFLECTION..... can you accept what appears? -Razard86

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   Yes, technology is evolving faster than the evolution of human consciousness. I see it's going to be difficult managing this as there's so many factors involved.

   More important is to just get on with life, try to improve your life bit by bit on the basics, while studying spirituality. Get and work your life purpose and vision, and the rest should mostly sort itself out.

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Yes, you can get ahead of your skiis and tumble off a cliff.


You are God. You are Truth. You are Love. You are Infinity.

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14 hours ago, DefinitelyNotARobot said:

With great power comes great responsibility. - Uncle Ben

With no power comes no responsibility - my prefered alternative quote ;)


🗣️🗯️  personal dev Log Lyfe Journal 🗿🎭 ~ Raw , Emotional, Unfiltered

 

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2 hours ago, Danioover9000 said:

More important is to just get on with life, try to improve your life bit by bit on the basics, while studying spirituality. Get and work your life purpose and vision, and the rest should mostly sort itself out.

Yeah I don't think that there is any reason to feel hopeless as hopelessness won't solve anything. There is nothing else to do for us other than to live up to our highest potential since that's the best thing we can contribute. I'm just curious as to what has to change within the way we approach science and technology if we plan on mastering this hurdle.

@Leo Gura What then can we do to handle this situation responsibly? And how realistic are the chances of society waking up to the responsibility that comes with our technology? My hope is that the future generations will learn from our mistakes. I grew up with video games and though they've created a lot of suffering in my life I'm grateful to have had the opportunity to learn from that experience and maybe I'll be able to teach my future children a thing or two about how to deal with these addictive technologies.

The problem is that I'm not quiet sure just how flexible the human mind is. If technology keeps evolving at faster rates we need to become more and more open-minded and adept to our environment at faster rates too. A thousand years ago people didn't imagine the future to look much differently from their present lives, since technological advance was very stale. These days it's starting to get to a point where there will be multiple significant breakthroughs during the course of a single human lifespan.

@mmKay Wait explain that one to me.


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@zurew That was a good read, thanks. The problem that I see is that it'd be difficult to get a general consensus on what values should be prioritized. This has to do, in part, with what I was talking about earlier in the op, which is that you have governments of different stages of development all existing alongside each other. This makes it virtually impossible to agree on a set of values since you'd end up having conflicts of interest between all sorts of ideologies. A stage red dictatorship wouldn't care about the values of a stage green socialist society. Just look at the whole freedom of speech debate for social media. And that's just social media. If we're talking about technologies such as AI or genetic engineering things become even messier.


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2 hours ago, DefinitelyNotARobot said:

The problem that I see is that it'd be difficult to get a general consensus on what values should be prioritized. This has to do, in part, with what I was talking about earlier in the op, which is that you have governments of different stages of development all existing alongside each other. This makes it virtually impossible to agree on a set of values since you'd end up having conflicts of interest between all sorts of ideologies.

Yeah, conscious design and conscious creation of tech seems very unrealistic because of the current dynamics of the world. Also, i don't even think that the biggest problem is agreeing on what values one tech should implant in us, but understanding the relationship between tech and human psychology so much so, that we can somewhat predict what kind of tech will cause what kind of psychological effects.

If we would understand the tech - psychology relationship better, then at the very least, we might be able to avoid implanting negative values. Now, of course, negative is relative, but generally speaking , most people would agree not to implant traits like anxiety, boredom, lack of focus etc.

Edited by zurew

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Surely by the time it gets a bit crazy, a chip that we can install into our mind/body will align us with higher levels? Ray Kurzweil spoke about it. Super human let’s go

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@B222

1 hour ago, B222 said:

Surely by the time it gets a bit crazy, a chip that we can install into our mind/body will align us with higher levels? Ray Kurzweil spoke about it. Super human let’s go

   When we get something like Altered Carbon, where we can just download souls into chips and put into bodies, is the beginning of the end of mankind. Also a chip installed into a brian, necessitates a database of all brains with chips, plus the ability to telepathy between chip users multiplies the epistemic problems of one individual unit of consciousness into a million ubits of consciousness.

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@zurew Yeah I think that that'd be an important step towards wiser technologies. A lot of social media platforms for example are designed in a way to make you addicted to them, because that's what's profitable for them: Keeping you on their platforms for as long as possible. The fact that weaknesses of the human psychology are being exploited in such selfish ways shows that we're still far away from responsibly dealing with the consequences of our technologies. If we let values like monetary gain control our technologies then we'll be blind to the obvious consequences of our actions. The algorithms Facebook used to keep users on their site are the same algorithms that incited genocides in Myanmar. But it's not really Facebooks fault because Facebooks values are just a reflection of our collective values. So the article is right in that we must focus on clarifying our values going into the future. This requires that society starts thinking about the broader systems which govern our world, like the human psychology in this case, and that we adjust our values based on how they affect these systems. That's a very profound idea which is being pointed out by that article there.

@B222 That could work, but there is immediate problems that we're facing right now and there'll probably be many more issues that arise before we get to that point. The problem is that we could've already done the damage at that point and that no heightened level of consciousness would allow for further survival. That's kind of the issue of this topic. I don't doubt that humanity could eventually achieve high levels of consciousness collectively, but we'd have to get there before our technology ends up erasing us. It could be that the technological future landscape would force us to adept to it by demanding us to raise our consciousness. This could come in the form of a cultural shift, or it could come in the form of some technology like the chip you've mentioned. Or it could be that it's already too late. Doesn't really matter. What matters is that we leave our future generations with something good to work with. They'll figure something out.


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I don't really know whether we can evolve too quickly. Cuz that's never happened. Not to my knowledge, at least. 

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@Danioover9000 the beginning of the end or the start/extension of infinity? If we reach such advanced states, it must also be possible to choose certain timelines and realities? Maybe we get there/have been there already, to realise human life really is the best, but could also get there and be so relieved. Who knows… also why is the end of mankind in that sense a bad thing? Might be similar to this plane but on a much broader level; space travel, etc 

Edited by B222

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I don't think so. Another thing is that an evolutionary step is that the human population is drastically reduced. the world wars were great evolutionary steps. they were not pleasant at all, the same the agricultural revolution, or the origin of the civilization. but the fact of being human is very often extremely unpleasant

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@mr_engineer Yeah that's the problem with this sort of topic. We don't have any reference experiences since we've never been in such a situation. All we can do at best is to observe and speculate about different patterns and to project our current, very limited, understanding onto the future.

@Breakingthewall That's somewhat true. I guess that we could use individual humans as analogies. Some people make huge mistakes which cause a lot of suffering for them and yet they end up recovering from it. A person might for example accidentally kill someone else and end up in prison for a few years, but this might actually make them stronger by forcing an internal shift and they'd come out of prison as a reformed person and then they might go on to do great things. Another person might go to jail and feel deeply traumatized by the guilt of having killed someone and they might decide to take their own life right then and there. My point is that not everybody can bounce back from everything. Some mistakes are final. The question is whether we're the first prisoner who will bounce back or if we're the second prisoner who's made the final mistake.


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1 hour ago, DefinitelyNotARobot said:

The question is whether we're the first prisoner who will bounce back or if we're the second prisoner who's made the final mistake.

we believe that we are a group of individuals when the reality is that humanity is something totally collective, like a giant hive of bees that acts as an entity. the evolutionary tides of humanity far transcend the individual and observing them it seems that they follow an obvious path: the total domain of reality. life is intelligent, seems that there are no mistakes, and humanity is the definitive step, in which reality becomes aware of itself and expands without limit. the megatons of suffering that are necessary for this are irrelevant, given what has been seen so far, so maybe many huge catastrophes will happen to adjust the mechanism 

Edited by Breakingthewall

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2 hours ago, DefinitelyNotARobot said:

@mr_engineer Yeah that's the problem with this sort of topic. We don't have any reference experiences since we've never been in such a situation. All we can do at best is to observe and speculate about different patterns and to project our current, very limited, understanding onto the future.

My suggestion would be that we don't worry about this and keep evolving quicker. We have a long way to go!! 

Unless you've had an experience of evolving too quickly. Then it makes sense to worry about it. Cuz something's happened in the past. Has it? 

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